With this Reader Idea, submitted by Danielle Harms, an assistant professor at George Mason University, we take that skill even further. Below, Ms. Harms explains how she uses The Times’s Room for Debate feature
to teach her college students how to support their claims while bringing many relevant “voices” into conversation with one another.

If you have a teaching idea you would like to share on The Learning Network, please let us know.

Teacher: Danielle Harms

Institution and Grade Level: George Mason University

Idea: After choosing a topic from the Room for Debate series, students write a researched persuasive essay on that issue.

Why We Chose It: While we’ve published other Reader Ideas as well as our own lesson about how teachers can use Room for Debate, we particularly like
how Ms. Harms emphasizes the importance of bringing multiple voices into a single conversation within their culminating essays.

Each semester the research and writing courses I teach at George Mason University culminate in a major research essay. I ask students to write in response to this scenario:

The Scenario

The New York Times editors are proud of the writing they publish in the Room for Debate series, but they have noticed a problem: The responses are brief, and often interested readers are left wanting more. That’s
where you come in. The editors have decided to expand the Room for Debate series by publishing a few thorough and in-depth essays responding to the debate questions. They have put out a call for essays and will
choose to publish the most compelling submissions.

Because you are a strong critical thinker, reader and writer, the editors at The Times have requested that you submit an essay. You may choose from any of the debate questions previously published in the Room for Debate
series.

The Process

Each student then individually selects a question from Room for Debate, reads the forum and uses the posts to help them understand the conversation and conduct outside research. The articles often lead them to additional
reliable sources and new perspectives.

As a prewriting activity, they write a dialogue where they imagine that they could sit down to lunch with the contributors
to the Room for Debate topic they’ve chosen. They portray how that conversation would go, literally bringing these many voices “into conversation” with one another. ​Then, they use the
Room for Debate articles as a starting point for engaging with a range of scholarly and popular sources.

Lastly, they draft and write a 1,250-word persuasive essay with an audience of interested Times readers in mind, bringing critical “voices” into conversation with one another and advancing their own unique
perspective.

Lessons Learned

I’ve been developing this assignment for a few years now, and each semester I get impressive feedback from students expressing how valuable they found it. Ibrahim Saad, a student in my Advanced Composition course,
wrote:

One of the most helpful tools I used during this process was the Room for Debate series. Using Room for Debate as a start for my project helped me to discover a debate that was current and interesting. I was able
to quickly read about many views regarding the issue in an informative and enjoyable fashion. As a result I was passionate about the topic for my Project 3 essay, and I had a vision of where my essay was headed
before I typed a single word.

Another student in Advanced Composition, Vjosa Poshka, shared:

I also found it difficult to maintain a persuasive tone when informing the reader of the studies and their results. I came to the conclusion that shedding light on their limitations would allow for a more compelling
argument. I felt as though the researchers and journalists I cited in my essay were conversing with each other (similar to that in-class lunch scenario exercise).

And Audrey Nerette, a student in my Composition 101 course, wrote:

It is a good exercise to recognize other people’s ideas by putting yourself in the position of each specialist in the Room for Debate forum and stop being stubborn by sticking to your own thoughts without
even considering other observations. It certainly helped me later on with my research paper because I became more objective through my arguments and understood where each specialist was coming from. Plus, it
is pretty fun to imagine that you are a well-known scientific figure giving your opinion in your field of study.

We spend seven weeks on the project, so we work towards many objectives with significant time dedicated to them. Students learn to recognize that complex questions can be approached from many angles and result in responses
that fall along a broad spectrum. They prepare to write for advanced classes in their academic discipline and develop as rhetorically flexible writers with audience awareness. They also learn to excel in the genre
of persuasive writing, and experience research driven by real inquiry and genuine curiosity.